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New Mexico

20 images Created 30 Sep 2019

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  • In amongst gypsum dunes that cover 1000s of acres, a lightning storm illuminates the centre of the large cloud over huge mountain ranges in Southern New Mexico. A 3/4 moon hangs silently between the thunder claps and our friend & tour guide Carole waits patiently in her powerful 4x4 for me to finish. I loved the atmosphere, the range of illumination and the surreal fake snow landscape! The lightning storm lasted for over an hour and 6 fighter jets from the nearby Almagordo Air Base blasted overhead into the night sky.
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  • A vast cloud towers over the San Andreas mountains to the West of White Sands National Monument in New Mexico. These are to the South of the same White Sands National Monument where America carried out many of it’s early nuclear weapons tests.
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  • A vast cloud towers over the San Andreas mountains to the West of White Sands National Monument in New Mexico. These are to the South of the same White Sands National Monument where America carried out many of it’s early nuclear weapons tests.
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  • 710 square kilometres of incredible white gypsum, that in the evening light pouring over the San Andreas Mountains turned vivid hues of pink & purple. Gentle ripples formed in the sand where this damp and binding mineral has been blown by regular strong winds. <br />
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To the North, almost 60% of these white sand gypsum dunes are still used for military weapons and missile testing - the first Fat Man plutonium bomb was tested in the Northern dunes.  <br />
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And yet, there was such a quietness there, calm and even solitude when you walked a little further into the dunes. We did two visits to this National Monument, and honestly, I could have spent many MANY more days in the minimalist nothingness.
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  • I’d been up one of the valleys that climbed to the huge ski-resort in the Rocky Mountains behind, where the temperature dropped 11º in just a mile or so. The huge spurs of mountain sides kept the late afternoon sunshine from reaching the valley itself so I took just one frame, but leaving the mountains took us to a sun-drenched plateau covered in lush vegetation and beautiful trees yellowing in the approaching Fall season.
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  • These incredible rock formations have been formed over millions of years and comprise layers from deltas, lake beds, sand dunes and coastal deposits. The colours from these different epochs are clearly seen in the banded strata stretching for mile after mile here above the Chaco Basin in New Mexico. <br />
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Some of the bands, especially from the sand dune age are very soft and crumbly giving rise (or fall) to collapse of the layers above creating some crazy rock formations.
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  • Echo Canyon is as it suggests, a natural amphitheatre. It consists of a huge concave hollow within colourful sandstone cliffs, carved by the action of water cascading over the top. This area represents the South Easternmost portion of the Colorado Plateau, a thick crustal block of the continent that has been lifted up forming a high desert environment with scattered forest below.
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  • Millions of years of creation, millions of years of erosion, leaving hard residual remnants of what existed before. A world in a continual process of change and even the geology changes beyond all recognition, let alone nations of people.
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  • Mind blowing colours threaded through thousands of acres of high mountains as we move North in New Mexico. The heat haze is still apparent in all these distant pictures but in a way does show the high 30º temperatures we’re experiencing in this desert landscape.
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  • This was my first trip to the States and almost everything about it reminded me of movies I’ve seen and picture books I’ve looked through over the years. It felt quite unlike others places I’ve been to in the world, not so much because of the landscape itself, but the way in which humans have tried to utilise the landscape and overcome living in such vast open lands. I was fascinated by sudden appearance of man made objects in the middle of grassland desert that stretched for thousands of acres.
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  • Absolutely delighted to have one of my New Mexico images selected for the AOP exhibition “HOPE” - once again proud to be alongside some major names in photography.
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  • Just south of The Three Sisters volcanoes in Western Albuquerque, looking towards the huge Sandia Mountain range of New Mexico. There is so little water in this state, therefore agriculture and arable farming is near impossible, but grasslands seem to abound on the vast open plains. Rattlesnakes however, are quite common, and I was extremely cautious about wandering into these grasslands to find the best foreground for pictures!
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  • The oldest part of the city of Albuquerque in New Mexico, founded here in 1706 by Spanish colonists. Lots of low, single story ‘adobe’ buildings create a very strong architectural character to the place. <br />
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The only thing that disappointed me was that almost every building is now a gift shop, and very touristy indeed. It’s hard to imagine what it was like in the old days with all that modern gifty stuff!
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  • 2020 - 15th B&W SPider Awards - Nominee in Fine Art<br />
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I was fascinated by the strangely sculptural but definitely incongruous water towers dotted across the New Mexico landscape. Literally in the middle of nowhere with hundreds of acres of nothingness around, these structures stick up out of the flat plains.  <br />
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This one, just off the historic Route 66 really caught my eye, so we detoured to get to it, finding ourselves at the gates of the Albuquerque Detention Centre! As numerous B&W Sheriff cars drove past I was super anxious about being detained myself, for taking pictures there, but I genuinely was just interested in the water tower. They must have thought I was more weird than dangerous, so left me to it :-)
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  • The sun dropped quite quickly in the evenings here, and the Sandia Mountains soon turned to half shadow. A few small houses caught the last of the light in the foothills.
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  • From Wiki - The roadrunners, also known as chaparral birds or chaparral cocks, are two species of fast-running ground cuckoos with long tails and crests. They are found in the southwestern and south-central United States and Mexico, usually in the desert
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  • Acres and acres of traditional rock climbing on the huge serrated ridges of the Sandia Mountains, New Mexico.
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  • Black Bears are now threatened in these Sandia Mountains, as always by the encroachment of man. Nevertheless, when we walked one of the many trails through these amazing mountains, we were very wary about bumping into a hungry one! <br />
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The highest summit is at an elevation of 10,678 ft (3,255 m) and <br />
is 4201 ft (1,280 m)  above the surrounding plains.
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